The typical modern American city really is like a machine. From the air, it looks like a circuit board. The cheap corporate-built buildings look like electronic components, and the roads look like circuit pathways. Down on the ground, there's no real society. Everyone is isolated in their homes, mechanized transport, or at places of business (remember that SpongeBob clip?).
Only technology and mechanistic routine - with an over-reliance on the vendor system - keeps things going. Even food is distributed by vendors in bullshit portions at bullshit prices from industrial processing. And to keep things running, the modern world has to have excessive rules. Many live the same.
All most people can do is work and consume, or go to school to work and consume. Modern work itself is often enough driven by
"scientific management", which often enough takes place in ugly and depressing fluorescent-lit factory-like environments - or actual factories. Gone are the days where one could more or less easily make a living on their own.
What little culture is left seems to be eroding away - especially with this "New Normal". Consumerism and politics - especially now - seem to be replacing it.
Socialization normally only happens in cliques. Technology is increasingly eroding that away, with "real life" increasingly being replaced with tech.
Not everything modern is bad of course, and the past wasn't exactly pleasant. But the combination that is the modern world is a miserable hell - although media and a social life can help one cope.
And power-hungry elite who run the show want it this way. A cybernetic hive of consumer serfs. A cyberpunk dystopia.
